Ecuador's War on Gangs: How a Crackdown Became an Endless Conflict

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Video originally published on November 14, 2025.

When armed gang members stormed a television station in Guayaquil and took hostages live on air in January 2024, the world watched in shock as Ecuador—once among Latin America's safest nations—descended into chaos. The newly installed President Daniel Noboa responded with overwhelming force, declaring the country in a state of internal armed conflict and deploying the military into prisons and slums to crush what narco-journalist Ioan Grillo termed a "gangster insurgency." For a brief moment, the decisive action appeared to work. Homicides dropped. Tens of thousands of suspected gang members were arrested. Even notorious drug kingpins were captured and extradited to the United States. Yet as the second year of Ecuador's internal armed conflict draws to a close, the violence has surged to unprecedented levels. With projections suggesting 9,100 homicides by year's end—a murder rate of fifty per 100,000 people, twice that of Mexico—Ecuador faces a grim reality: the gangs may be winning. What began as a forceful state response now risks becoming a decades-long quagmire, echoing not El Salvador's brutal victory over organized crime, but Mexico's endless drug war.

Key Takeaways

Ecuador’s 2024 gang attacks prompted President Daniel Noboa to declare a state of internal armed conflict, deploying the military to prisons and slums in a hard‑war approach.
The initial crackdown cut homicides and seized high‑profile drug kingpins, but by 2025 the country’s murder rate is projected to reach about 50 per 100,000—twice Mexico’s rate and higher than South Africa’s.
The rapid rise from 7.7 per 100,000 in 2020 to roughly 50 per 100,000 in five years marks Ecuador’s steepest decline in safety in Latin America’s history.
Mexican cartels—especially the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa—entered Ecuador after the 2016 Colombia peace deal, exploiting weakened prisons and sparking a fracturing of local gangs.
Prison wars, budget cuts, and corruption of the judiciary and security agencies allowed gangs to seize control of prisons, turning them into recruitment and operational bases.
Gang fragmentation after arrests and extraditions has created splinter groups that fight each other, driving unpredictable spikes in violence across coastal cities like Guayaquil and Durán.

The Spark: Coordinated Terror and the Live Broadcast Hostage Crisis

The gangster insurgency that would thrust Ecuador into international headlines began with a series of coordinated attacks on January 9, 2024, following President Noboa's declaration of a sixty-day state of emergency. The immediate trigger had been the back-to-back prison escapes of the leaders of Los Choneros and Los Lobos at the start of the month, but what transformed a security crisis into something approaching warfare was the gangs' calculated show of strength across the nation. Across Ecuador, a day of sheer terror unfolded. Bombs detonated in multiple locations. Police officers were kidnapped from their posts. Prisons were overrun and guards lynched by rioting inmates. Gunmen attacked hospitals and attempted to kidnap students from university campuses. The violence was coordinated, simultaneous, and designed to demonstrate that the gangs possessed not just firepower but organizational capacity—the ability to strike across the country at will. Yet it was the assault on a Guayaquil television station that seared itself into global consciousness. Armed gang members invaded the facility and took hostages live on air, creating images that would be broadcast around the world. The brazenness of the attack—carried out in real time, with cameras rolling—represented more than criminal violence. It was a direct challenge to state authority, a demonstration that the gangs could strike at the heart of civil society and do so with theatrical impunity. The January 9 attacks did not emerge from a vacuum. They represented the culmination of years of deteriorating security conditions, as Ecuador transformed from one of Latin America's safest nations into a battleground for proxy wars between Mexico's most powerful cartels. The violence that shocked the world that day was merely the most visible manifestation of a conflict that had been building in Ecuador's prisons and coastal cities for years, finally erupting into the open with devastating force.

Noboa's Declaration: Reframing Gangs as Insurgents

President Daniel Noboa's response to the January attacks was swift and unprecedented. He declared Ecuador in a state of internal armed conflict and designated twenty-two gangs as terrorist organizations. The legal and political ramifications of this proclamation were profound, fundamentally altering the framework through which the state would engage with organized crime. By declaring an internal armed conflict, Noboa shifted the government's posture from law enforcement to military engagement. The designation of gangs as terrorist organizations provided legal justification for deploying the armed forces into domestic security operations on a massive scale. It was a move that transformed gang members from criminals to be arrested and prosecuted into enemy combatants to be neutralized. The military deployment was rapid and extensive. Armed forces moved into the nation's prisons, which had effectively been seized by gangs and transformed into bases for organizing criminal activities. Soldiers also deployed onto the streets of coastal cities and into the slums where gang influence was strongest. Tens of thousands of suspected gang members were arrested in sweeping operations designed to decapitate the criminal organizations and reassert state control. At first, the massive show of state force appeared to achieve its objectives. Violence plummeted in the initial months of the internal armed conflict. By May 2024, Noboa had become the most popular leader in all of Latin America, briefly even surpassing El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, whose own brutal gang crackdown had made him a regional icon of mano dura politics. The gangs' hold on prisons appeared broken. High-value targets were captured, including former Los Choneros leader Fito, who was extradited to America to stand trial. The nation ended 2024 with a murder rate that had dropped to thirty-eight per 100,000—still catastrophically high by historical standards, but lower than the forty-six per 100,000 recorded in 2023. For a moment, it seemed Ecuador might be heading in the right direction, that Noboa's decisive action had saved the nation from complete collapse. The results were somewhat disappointing, perhaps, but the trajectory appeared positive. That optimism would prove tragically premature.

From Peaceful Nation to War Zone: Ecuador's Catastrophic Transformation

To understand the scale of Ecuador's collapse, one must grasp how rapidly and completely the country has been transformed. In 2018, Ecuador had a homicide rate of six per 100,000 people—on par with the United States. As late as 2020, the rate stood at just 7.7. For most of the previous decade, Ecuador had been among the safest nations in Latin America, a member of what might be called the hallowed club of Latin nations without sky-high murder rates, alongside Uruguay and Chile. The projected murder rate for 2025—fifty per 100,000—represents an almost incomprehensible deterioration. To go from 7.7 homicides per 100,000 to fifty in just five years ranks as the grimmest kind of achievement. By August 2025, over 5,200 people had already been murdered. Current projections suggest some 9,100 homicides will have taken place by year's end, out of a population of around eighteen million. To put this in perspective: a similar jump in the United States would take the nation from 22,830 total homicides in 2023 to roughly 168,000 murders per year. Ecuador's projected 2025 murder rate is twice as high as Mexico's, higher even than South Africa's, and nearly touches that of Venezuela in 2014, when the Bolivarian Republic was in a state of outright collapse. While El Salvador likely recorded the worst rate the Americas have seen this century—an eyewatering 103 homicides per 100,000 people in 2015—what makes Ecuador's case so shocking is the velocity of change. The violence is not evenly distributed. According to the Wall Street Journal, five of the world's twelve most murderous cities are in Ecuador, with the city of Durán ranked number one. Durán alone has a homicide rate of 140 per 100,000 inhabitants. Just across the river, the larger port city of Guayaquil has seen roughly one third of all murders committed in Ecuador this year. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project estimates that eighty percent of all violence in Ecuador takes place in these coastal regions. Yet statistics, however staggering, fail to capture the human horror. Between January and August 2025, 386 minors were murdered—the equivalent of three children and teenagers being slain every forty-eight hours, a fifty percent increase compared to the previous year. Among them was Ezequiel, known as Eze, a five-year-old boy gunned down on the doorstep of his home in Guayaquil. There was the car bomb that detonated outside a mall in Guayaquil in October, killing one and injuring dozens. The mass shooting in the deprived neighborhood of Nueva Prosperina in March that killed twenty-two people. Prison riots that see scores of inmates slaughtered. The gangs now operate in over 150 of Ecuador's 222 municipalities. Their membership is estimated at a bare minimum of 15,000, with some analysts putting the total at over 60,000 members. The violence they inflict is marked by almost theatrical brutality: gangsters hanging the corpses of victims from bridges, playing football with decapitated heads, storming into funerals and shooting up the casket of a rival while killing friends and family members in the process. It is a level of savagery that has become grimly familiar to observers of Mexico's drug war—and for good reason.

The Cartel Invasion: How Mexican Proxies Transformed Ecuador

Ecuador's descent into chaos has many contributing factors, but one stands above the rest in explaining the scale and brutality of the violence: the arrival of Mexico's cartels. The structural forces that enabled this invasion were both homegrown and external, creating a perfect storm that would shatter Ecuador's relative peace. Domestic policy decisions laid the groundwork. Leftist President Rafael Correa closed down a local U.S. military base that had been set up to monitor drug traffickers. His protégé, Lenín Moreno, shut down agencies devoted to fighting corruption while slashing the prison budget by thirty percent—a move undertaken even as gangs began using prisons as bases for recruitment. The prison population more than tripled between 2010 and 2020, and the combination of overcrowding and underfunding allowed Ecuador's gangs to effectively seize control of correctional facilities, turning them into command centers for criminal operations. But the catalyst that truly opened Ecuador to cartel penetration came from beyond its borders: the 2016 peace agreement neighboring Colombia signed with the rebel group FARC, ending fifty years of war. Although FARC had started as a Marxist rebellion, by the modern era it had morphed into a powerful drug trafficking network. So long as FARC controlled trafficking routes and cocaine production along the Ecuadorian border, there was no point in any other outfit trying to get involved. The 2016 deal changed everything. Suddenly, these hyper-lucrative drug trafficking routes were essentially there for the taking. It is likely no coincidence that 2016 saw the Jalisco New Generation Cartel first appear in Ecuador. In this, they were following their notorious rivals from the Sinaloa Cartel, who had been establishing a foothold in the country for years. Sinaloa recruited local gang Los Choneros, who took over many of the cocaine routes. Crucially, though, Los Choneros were not particularly unified as a crime syndicate. In a bid to expand their power as they moved deeper into the drug game, they forced other gangs to join them under threat of extreme violence. When Jalisco arrived, they entered an underworld already simmering with anger at Sinaloa's local proxy. In December 2020, Los Choneros' leader—a figure known as Rasquiña—was assassinated at a mall. Smaller gangs that had been led by Los Choneros—the Wolves, the Tiguerones, and the Chone Killers—initially coalesced into a new Jalisco proxy called New Generation. These smaller gangs sought ties with Jalisco, believing an alliance with Sinaloa's rival would allow them to confront Los Choneros. From this coalition would emerge Los Lobos, perhaps Ecuador's most powerful criminal force. The proxy war between Mexico's two most feared cartels ignited first in Ecuador's prisons. Across 2021, over 200 prisoners died horrific deaths in a series of riots and massacres, with the worst taking place in Guayaquil that September. Many of the victims were butchered with chainsaws or beheaded with machetes. As the violence built, Ecuador's political systems were quietly being corrupted by the massive influx of drug money. Sprawling investigations with names like Metástasis, Purga, and Plaga revealed strong links between criminal groups and politicians, journalists, lawyers, judicial officials, and even former legislators, as former attorney general Diana Salazar would later document. The corruption reached the highest levels. In 2023, it was revealed that then-President Guillermo Lasso's brother-in-law was connected with the Albanian mafia, who—along with Italian crime groups—were also trying to muscle in on Ecuador's cocaine trafficking boom. Combined with other embezzlement scandals, this was the last straw. Lasso dissolved the National Assembly and resigned the presidency two years ahead of schedule to avoid impeachment. The resulting power vacuum and looming election would convince the gangs to deploy political violence to sway the outcome, culminating in the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in August 2023 following a campaign rally in Quito, in a hit believed to have been carried out by Los Lobos.

The Crackdown's Unraveling: Fragmentation and Escalating Violence

Barely had 2025 dawned when violence surged to what the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project has called unprecedented levels. The question that haunts Ecuador's security establishment is simple yet devastating: why has the second year of the internal armed conflict proven far bloodier than the first? The answer lies in an unintended consequence of the crackdown itself, a phenomenon familiar to security analysts who studied the aftermath of European police cracking the EncroChat encrypted messaging service in 2020. When authorities arrested thousands of criminals across the continent and imprisoned the heads of major gangs, some countries—such as Sweden—actually experienced increased violence. With once-dominant gangs smashed, a power vacuum opened, encouraging numerous smaller, diffuse outfits to rush in and fill it. The result was more shootings, more bombings, more murders than before. A similar mechanism is driving Ecuador's 2025 surge. As the crackdown caused larger groups to splinter, those splinters have begun fighting each other for their once-shared territory with predictably bloody results. Los Tiguerones, led by a figure with the improbable name of Negro Willy and thought to have been behind the television station attack, splintered into rival factions after his arrest in Spain in late 2024. The Guayaquil-based gang's internal war to determine who would claim the spoils has been brutal. The same pattern repeated with Los Chone Killers in Durán. After leader Ben 10 was assassinated in Colombia in December 2024, his former gang pulled itself apart, leaving five new splinter groups battling for control of the streets. The extradition to America of former Los Choneros leader Fito produced similar fragmentation. As the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime explained, the current wave of violence is driven by divisions within criminal groups resulting from the arrest, murder, or extradition of their leaders, showing a more dispersed and volatile pattern with the emergence of new criminal groups lacking solid hierarchical structures, leading to more frequent and unpredictable acts of violence. The consequences extend far beyond gang-on-gang warfare. The theatrical violence the gangs employ—leaving headless corpses on streets as warnings, shooting up funerals—destabilizes society as a whole. According to the International Monetary Fund, a one percent increase in the local murder rate is associated with a decline in the level of economic activity of up to 0.5 percent. Innocent civilians are frequently caught up in turf wars, either becoming victims of violence or getting shaken down for money. Five-year-old Eze, killed on his parents' doorstep by a stray bullet, represents just one of hundreds of children murdered in the crossfire. Meanwhile, the military crackdown itself has become haunted by scandals involving security forces killing civilians. The most egregious incident came in December 2024, when the burned bodies of four boys were found not far from a military base on Christmas Eve. Aged between eleven and fifteen, it later emerged they had been swept up by an army patrol before likely being killed in custody. Rather than gang members, they had simply been on their way to a soccer game. The incident represents the kind of abuse and disappearances that have marked other attempts at mano dura in Latin America, threatening to undermine whatever legitimacy the crackdown still possesses. The violence has also returned to the prisons that were supposedly brought under control. In 2025, prison massacres resumed with a vengeance. In September alone, two separate prison riots saw at least thirty people slaughtered in gruesome ways, echoing the horrors of 2021 and suggesting that the military's grip on correctional facilities was far more tenuous than authorities had claimed.

The Path Forward: Hegemony, Adaptation, or Endless War

As 2025 draws to a close, Ecuador stands at a crossroads. The trajectory of the conflict depends on several factors, none of them entirely within the government's control, and all of them fraught with moral and practical complications. One possibility is that a single gang emerges from the factional wars as the undisputed leader of Ecuador's criminal underworld. Los Lobos is already angling to make alliances with other groups that could transform it into something of a hegemon. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, such consolidation would reinforce Los Lobos' territorial and logistical control, strengthen drug trafficking routes, and extend the group's dominance into illegal mining and extortion. Paradoxically, this could temporarily lower levels of armed violence as a result of the group's dominance. The grim calculus here is clear: a unified criminal organization, while continuing to smuggle drugs and engage in other illegal activities, would have less incentive to engage in the spectacular violence that marks turf wars between competing factions. It is the same logic that led some observers to note that Colombia was, in certain respects, more stable when Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel dominated the cocaine trade than in the fragmented landscape that followed its destruction. Yet accepting such an outcome would mean acknowledging the state's inability to truly defeat organized crime, settling instead for a managed coexistence that reduces body counts while allowing criminal enterprises to flourish. The alternative is for President Noboa to pivot from the original military crackdown to a strategy capable of addressing the root causes of gang dominance in Ecuador's coastal regions. While the military response was justifiable as long as it appeared to be working, rising violence demonstrates it has run its course. The question of what that alternative plan might look like remains difficult to answer. Were it easy, Ecuador would not be in this catastrophic situation. Yet the consequences of continuing down the current path offer a stark warning. In 2006, President Felipe Calderón of Mexico launched what was supposed to be a major crackdown against drug cartels. Nearly two decades later, Mexico's drug war continues unabated. In that time, around 100,000 people have been disappeared by the cartels and security forces, while whole regions of the country remain beyond the authorities' effective control. The cartels have only expanded their business interests into new markets, including the avocado trade, demonstrating their ability to adapt and diversify in the face of state pressure. Ecuador is not destined to become a South American Mexico. The countries differ in size, geography, political structure, and the nature of their criminal organizations. But Mexico's experience offers a cautionary tale of what can happen when a government goes all in on destroying gangs through military force alone, only to find itself locked in a decades-long conflict with no clear path to victory. It demonstrates how a security crisis can metastasize into a permanent condition, how extraordinary measures can become normalized, and how the line between state and criminal violence can blur when the former adopts the tactics of the latter. It has now been almost two years since Ecuador declared itself in a state of internal armed conflict. The initial optimism that greeted President Noboa's decisive response has given way to a grimmer reality. With violence at unprecedented levels, gangs fragmenting into more volatile and unpredictable factions, and the military crackdown producing both diminishing returns and troubling abuses, the gangster insurgency shows no signs of ending. Whether Ecuador can find a path out of this spiral—through some combination of security measures, anti-corruption efforts, economic development in marginalized communities, and international cooperation to disrupt cartel supply chains—remains an open question. What is certain is that the current approach is failing, and that absent significant changes in strategy, Ecuador risks joining Mexico in a conflict that stretches not for years but for decades, consuming generations in violence that serves no purpose beyond perpetuating itself.

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FAQ

What triggered Ecuador’s declaration of a state of internal armed conflict?

The coordinated gang attacks on January 9, 2024—including the live‑broadcast hostage takeover of a Guayaquil TV station—prompted President Daniel Noboa to declare a state of internal armed conflict and deploy the military to prisons and slums.

How did the initial crackdown affect homicide rates in Ecuador?

In the first months of the internal armed conflict, homicides fell to about 38 per 100,000, and tens of thousands of suspected gang members were arrested, including drug kingpins such as Los Choneros’ Fito, giving the appearance of a successful hard‑knock campaign.

What role did Mexican cartels play in Ecuador’s current violence?

After the 2016 Colombia peace deal opened lucrative trafficking routes, Mexican cartels like the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa infiltrated Ecuador, allied with local gangs such as Los Choneros, and their arrival triggered gang fragmentation, prison wars, and a surge in murders.

Why is violence increasing again in 2025 despite the crackdown?

The crackdown caused large gangs to splinter; new factions now fight for territory, leading to unpredictable, high‑level violence, while prison massacres and corruption have undermined the military’s ability to maintain order.

What is the projected homicide rate for Ecuador in 2025?

Current projections estimate about 9,100 homicides by the end of 2025, which translates to roughly 50 homicides per 100,000 people—twice Mexico’s rate and higher than South Africa’s.

Sources

About the Author

Jackson Reed

Jackson Reed creates and presents analysis focused on military doctrine, strategic competition, and conflict dynamics.

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